Small business adding jobs and seeing new growth because of tax cuts

Gary Rabine:

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But don’t forget about small businesses, which under the new law receive a 20% tax deduction and the ability to immediately expense their business investments. Our actions may not generate headlines, but they are also giving pay increases to their employees and expanding their businesses as a result of the new tax law.

Take my company, the Rabine Group, a group of nine small Illinois-based companies providing paving, roofing, property assessment technology, dump trucking and exterior facility maintenance and construction. Because of tax cuts, our companies are able to do additional things that will spark economic growth. These include raises and bonuses for our teammates, larger donations to nonprofits, more hiring and jobs, larger research and development (R&D) spending, and expansion.

We will be giving raises that are roughly 50% larger than the past eight years and also larger bonus incentives. Our donations to the nonprofit foundations we support will in many cases double in 2018, and we will be adding jobs across the board from entry-level to leadership.

The combination of small business and corporate tax cuts has created small business optimism like we haven’t seen in more than a decade. Small businesses like ours work for great companies like Exelon, Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s. And when they are growing, we can count on more opportunity.

We had two startup companies on hold for the last three to five years and these tax cuts incentivized us to start them on Jan. 1. We estimate each company will employ five to 15 employees within the first year.

Meanwhile, our existing companies will double their R&D investment and add 20 to 30 employees this year. These are people who would not have been hired under the previous presidential administration or most likely the alternative administration in the last election.

We think this R&D and these new companies will create customer value and differentiation that will allow our American companies to grow globally for the first time in our 36-year history.

It’s not just me. Through my affiliation with national business leadership organizations and large nonprofits, I’ve learned that many American small businesses, including Joseph's Lite Cookies and Staub Manufacturing, across America are also pumping their tax cuts back into their employees, investing more in R&D, or increasing their support for causes they believe in.
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Some small businesses may take longer because they do not have the accounting muscle to dig into the tax code to see the new opportunities.  They are expected to catch up as small business organizations communicate the opportunities.  The growth in this area could surpass that of big business.